Theatre Aquarius begins its 40th season on a high note with a smashing production of Philip King’s 1944 British farce See How They Run. It’s good old-fashioned silly fun that points clearly ahead to such classic television farces as Fawlty Towers. The play is so well cast and director Marcia Kash’s sense of comic pacing is so spot-on, that the phrase “you’ll laugh till you cry” is simply a statement of fact.

Philip King’s best-known farce transferred to London, opening in the West End on January 4, 1945, when London was still under bombardment. It says something about the nature of the British populace, the need for entertainment in hard times and the sublime funniness of the play that no one left the theatre even though three V-1 flying bombs exploded nearby during the performance.

The action is set in 1943 in the fictional rural village of Merton-cum-Midlewick in the living room of the local vicar, Rev. Lionel Toop (Ivan Sherry). Toop has married his childhood sweetheart Penelope (Sarah Mennell), a former actress and singer, whose bizarre throat-warming exercises greet us as the lights go up on Patrick Clark’s delightful set. Clark’s set perfectly captures the respectable tawdriness of so many British homes while its neo-gothic mullions mark the house as a church manse and its five entrances into a relatively small space, including large French doors to a garden, signal that the play is a farce.

The play begins innocently enough when the Toops’ Cockney maid Ida (Karen Wood) shows in Miss Skillon (Andrea Risk), the village’s self-appointed morality officer and busybody. Costume-designer Eileen Borghesan has hilariously padded, costumed and wigged Risk to make her appear as awful as possible – like some kind of cross between a Valkyrie and a butterball turkey. King’s farce is hardly concerned with politically correctness since verbal and physical jokes about Miss Skillon heft and girth are a continuous source of humour throughout the play. We hardly sympathize with her, however, since she is small-minded, prudish and mean. She’s upset that Penelope has taken it upon herself to decorate the altar for the coming Harvest Festival which since time immemorial has been her special duty. Besides that, she thinks the vicar ought to know that his wife has been indecorously displaying herself in trousers on the high street again and was recently seen yoo-hooing to a soldier who had just yoo-hooed to her.

As it turns out, said soldier was Lance-Corporal Clive Winton (Darren Keay), an old friend of Penelope’s and a fellow actor. Since Lionel has to be away that evening and the following day and since it won’t be seemly for Penelope to be at home with an unmarried man, the two decide to go to a neighbouring village to see a production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, a show in which they had toured in the leading roles. Clive can’t be seen in town in his uniform so Penelope has the bright idea of dressing him in one of Lionel’s vicar’s outfits including the dog-collar. So attired Clive and Penelope playfully reenact the big fight from Coward’s play when Miss Skillon enters unexpectedly, assumes the vicar and wife are having a row, intervenes and is knocked unconscious.

This is merely the set-up for the increasingly rumbustious action that follows. Just add the early arrival of Penelope’s uncle, the Bishop of Lax (a stuffy but kindly Robin Ward) plus an escaped German POW (Mark Crawford), armed and dangerous, who knocks out and undresses Lionel to dress himself as s vicar, plus the arrival of the vicar Arthur Humphrey (Anthony Bekenn), who is to preach the Sunday sermon in Lionel’s absence and you have more people on stage in clerical costume than you can shake a shepherd’s crook at.

To make all this even more complex, Miss Skillon has somehow drunk all the cooking sherry and that potent potion alternately releases her repressed libido and knocks her out producing an immovable dead weight. The physical comedy involved in trying to shift or stifle this super-plus-sized rag-doll is supremely funny and beautifully acted and directed. At one point the gaggle of clerics – some real, some impostors, some clad, one not – chase each other in and out of the room leaping over the unconscious Miss Skillon with a single bound, even when she’s been dragged out of the way. At the end Sergeant Towers (a dour Michael Hannigan) arrives to try to sort out what has become a riotously tangled situation.

From the slow, calm beginning to this manic climactic chase, Kash has carefully and exponentially ratcheted up the action and the humour. To see Penelope, Clive and Ida attempting against all odds to retain a façade of normality for the sake of the bishop is the height of hilarity.

Kash, of course, has a near-perfect cast to work with. Mennell and Sherry make it perfectly believable that a vicar and actress should marry. Sherry gives Lionel an underlying sense of humour and Mennell shows us early on that Penelope has a firm sense of herself. Penelope tells Clive that she knew her limitations as an actress and she, like Sherry, give us a much more rounded sense of character than is usually found in farces. For his part Keay is quite dashing as Clive and he accomplishes the difficult task in farce of showing that Clive and Penelope are simply the best of pals and nothing more.

Naturally Andrea Risk as Miss Skillon and Karen Wood as Ida steal the show. Risk is a master of verbal and physical comedy and must be incredible limber to endure some of terribly unseemly poses she falls into when unconscious. Wood has a sense of comic timing like no other though she is given to a good deal of mugging. Her low curtseys before “his highness” the Bishop are priceless and one of the most hysterical scenes in the play belongs to her when she tries through increasingly desperate mime to tell Penelope that the drunken Miss Skillon is in the cupboard.

The one issue Kash hasn’t quite solved is the issue of the German POW. On the one hand his English seems to be so good that no one notices that he’s German when he speaks. On the other hand, if he had a strong accent it would be much funnier for everyone not to notice until it is pointed out that he’s the escaped POW. Kash has Crawford play the role halfway in between which doesn’t work. But that’s a minor quibble in an otherwise sparkling show.

If you live anywhere near the Hamilton area you should put See How They Run on your must-see list. If you don’t live near Hamilton, consider a detour. It’s a show sure to lift any mood. The British motto may have been “Keep calm and carry on”, but this farce shows that motto could have been “All you need is a really good laugh to carry on”.